When law enforcement, fire, emergency medical services or other emergency management are confronted with an incident, reliability of communications is mission critical. Indeed, there is a need to have the right information at the right time and from the right people. Communications, both between the command post and the dispatch center, as well as traffic between participants on-scene, becomes highly important to ensure that all participants are up to date and prepared when they arrive on the scene.
For this purpose, critical networks, which are created specifically for public safety organisations unlike commercial networks designed for the general public, provide the information security and reliability that responders require, especially during a crisis. Such networks are built for high reliability and large area coverage, thus reducing overall speed, and ensuring that an interconnection is always available to keep safety officers and the like in contact and up-to-date with vital information related to the incident. In particular, sensitive or “mission critical” data is typically delivered to users on such a reliable, secure critical networks. This information is can be shared by all responders who can benefit from its collective value, whether they are on the front line or in the control room.
One major drawback of such networks, however, is that they typically use narrow band, with a resulting transmission speed below 19200 bits-per-second. This limited bandwidth is a serious drawback when trying to implement newer software solutions which typically have much higher requirements vis-à-vis the speed of connections in order to download, for example, static information such as maps or software updates and the like. It is therefore highly desirable to use higher speed networks, such as a public 3G cellular or broadband (WiFi) networks. However, commercial public networks are typically not as secure and reliable as private networks, especially in crisis situations where public networks are often flooded by users trying to reach their relatives, up load video and photographs of the incident, or the like.
Although one prior art solution involves the use of mobile VPN solutions, which allow roaming between networks depending on availability, such solutions are limited to roam all the traffic from every application at the same time to the same network. As a result, only the one communication network is usable at a given time and another issue arises, namely that applications requiring higher speed networks create congestion when roaming to a lower speed network. Although using special IP filters can partially address this problem, many data packets from applications with high communication requirements, which might have been queued for transmission, are typically required to be acknowledged by the receiving peer to keep the VPN connection synchronized. Another problem is that critical data communications can potentially roam to an unsecured public network in order to allow applications requiring faster data transfer to be usable. Still, even with a VPN tunnel, public safety agencies are required to ensure that the critical information will safely reach the recipient without any corruption and interception by a third party.
What is therefore needed, and one object of the present invention, is a system that creates a single secured tunnel while using multiple communication networks at the same time, such that each application can be assigned to a communication pipe and critical applications use the most secure and reliable network, even at lower speed, while applications requiring higher data speed transfer use public communication networks.